Melancholy

by Carina del Valle Schorske (http://thepointmag.com/author/carinadelvalledschorske) in

Examined Life (http://thepointmag.com/category/examined-life)

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Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition
we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the
earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make
use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact
synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language were still learning. We
keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new
words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collection
Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes,
who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block.
They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all
melancholics. Sontag doesnt use the word depression in the company of
her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy
distinction: Depression is melancholy minus its charms. But what are the
charms of melancholy?
There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and
genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne
confessing, It was a melancholy humor which first put into my head this
raving concern with writing. We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain,
Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace. We have the stubborn conviction
that all of these artists produced the work they did not in spite of, but
somehow because of, their suffering. The charms of melancholy seem to be
the charms of van Goghs quietly kaleidoscopic color palette: in one selfportrait, every color used on his face is echoed elsewhere in the
surroundings. His white bandage complements the canvas in the corner, his
yellow skin the wall, his blue hat the blue window. The charms of his work
become the charms of his persona and his predicament.

But theres another kind of portrait possible: the melancholic has not always
and everywhere been cast as the romantic hero. In fact, Montaignes
discussion of melancholy was meant as a kind of Neoplatonic corrective to
the old medieval typology of the four humors which cast the melancholic,
choking on an excess of black bile, as an unfortunate miser and sluggard,
despised for his unsociability and general incompetence. That sounds more
like it. Indeed, the medieval portrait of melancholy seems to have something
in common with our understanding of depression todayor at least of the
depressed person we see in pharmaceutical advertisements, whose disease
seems to be lack of interest in the family barbecue. We do have our share of
romantic geniusesthe suicide of David Foster Wallace is a dark lodestar
over recent generations of writers. The pharmacological discourse of
depression has not entirely replaced the romantic discourse of melancholy.
But on the whole, contemporary American culture seems committed to a
final solution.
Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the
one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of
depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential
attributes of the depressed personher posture of persistent critique, her
intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking
pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of
insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for
herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate
person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates
between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a
mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking
resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.

When I was a child I had a strong curiosity regarding depression, as well as a

disdain for it that I learned from my family the way other children learn
disdain for the poor. All of my grandparents were either medicated or selfmedicating for mood disorders, and my mother watched me tensely, my
crybaby ways on the playground, the grave faces on my colored pencil
portraits, my mock burials in the sandbox. No shadow that crossed my face
escaped her eye: Well, why are you being bullied? And did you tell the
teacher? If youre unhappy, well switch schools. Do you want to stay
somewhere that makes you miserable? I think she meant to soothe my
natural sadness before it had the chance to trigger the brooding alcoholic
latent in my genome. Solutionism: mostly practical, but also spiritual. Both
my mother and father were heavily engaged in a religious community that
promised nothing short of enlightenment, and my earliest picture book
What to Remember to Be Happywas authored by their guru. I preferred
Snow White and Rose Red, the mesmerizing tale of an ungrateful gnome and a
girl who falls in love with a bear.
It was this rhetorical environment that made me think of depressed people
as those sorry souls who refused heaven, who didnt want to find solutions
for their feelings. Or else people who, through no fault of their own, lived
lives so freighted with violence, responsibility and structural inequality that
any resolution would require a revolution. My mother suggested that her own
motheran orphaned immigrantfell into this category. I did not. On the
whole I wanted to be a good girl, and grateful. I didnt want to be an
impossible problem. But it didnt seem to me that feeling a little sad, or even
very sad, made me a problem, and I was both eager and afraid for the day
when I would be free to allow my melancholy to play itself out on its own
schedule.
In high school I loved Joni Mitchell, her face all mountain crag and shadow on
the CD jacket for Blue. And on the title track, her lyrics: Everybodys saying
that hells the hippest way to go / Well I dont think so / But Im gonna take a

look around. This is a cautious woman, skeptical of the melodrama of

melancholy, its hipness. Even though I felt at home in those words, I hated
the lost, spiraling minor descent her voice made into the void. In his first
published short story, The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the
Bad Thing, David Foster Wallace describes the feeling of depression as like
being underwater, but maybe imagine the moment in which you realize, at
which it hits you that there is no surface for you, that youre just going to
drown in there no matter which way you swim. Joni Mitchells voice was
adrift in the world Wallace describes. I couldnt get my bearings, even when I
tried to hook my ear to a note in the middle, the way youre told to spit if
youre caught rolling in a riptide and dont know which way is air, and breath,
and life. So I would usually listen to the first few seconds and skip to the next
track, called California, which reminded me where I was, just north of San
Francisco. And even though I couldnt stand listening to Blue, I envied its
making, which I fantasized as a radical gesture of emotional independence.
Indeed when I (inevitably?) fell into a clinical depression myself, one of my
few pleasures was the imperviousness of my pain to my mothers advice.
Aloneand with my long-distance boyfriend, who was saved from my vacant
gaze by the pixelated imperfection of our Skype connectionI was classically
self-loathing. Freud noticed that the melancholic has a keener eye for the
truth than other people who are not melancholic. When in his heightened
self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in
independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his
own nature, it may be that he has come pretty near to understanding
himself. And indeed, I spoke with a kind of confidence to my mother
regarding my condition, demonstrating the insistent communicativeness
of the melancholic, which finds satisfaction in self-exposure. This is the
kind of meaning words like satisfaction come to have in this state of
emergency. Satisfaction is the right to remain underwater when your
mother is fishing for you with her golden line.

The state of emergency lasted for about twenty months. Even now its hard to
say when it began, and harder still to say when it endedthe psychic pain
has subsided asymptotically, and today I hover near normal like a highspeed train over electrically charged tracks. But I know better than to
minimize the difference between those twenty months and a bad mood now.
When I think about that period, I dont remember much beyond my bedroom.
I remember the bedbug infestation. I remember how the pictures shook on
the wall when the policeman came knocking at my door to make sure I wasnt
missing. And I remember the window, especially at night when I couldnt
see past my own reflection through to the elm tree outside. I remember
enough to feel afraid of going back there; even writing much about that
period seems inadvisable. And yet I see my mind circle the scene, as though
theres something to be scavenged. As though the depression could show me
something other than my weaknesses.

Freud was not a romantic, despite his affection for the poetry of Goethe and
Rilke, and he was certainly not a romantic in his vision of psychological
suffering. Many of his patients were in serious troublethe kind of trouble
that prevents you from shitting without the aid of an enema, or makes you
think youre pregnant when youre a virgin (these examples, it bears
mentioning, come from his early cases). Freuds aim was to cureto
alleviate the symptoms that his patients dropped like dead birds at his
doorstep. But he knew that his patients, the sort of people that didnt feel
they fit in with Viennese society, were not the only ones leaving morbid
gifts. Freud didnt romanticize sickness, but much more radically, he didnt
romanticize normalness: Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on
the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or
other. He placed every human psyche on the same continuum; in his
estimation the normal fascination of the lover with an article of his

beloveds clothing shades into the shoe fetishists obsession. Insofar as any
of us are capable of insight or knowledge, the crazy are just as capable as the
sane. We all have reasons for doing what we do, however buried or byzantine.
Still, Ive always found Freuds landmark essay Mourning and Melancholia
difficult to follow. He gets some things so rightwhat melancholy looks and
feels like, how its symptoms show up. But the central claim is strange: Freud
argues that all of the self-reproaches so typical of the melancholic, even if
they seem justified, are secretly and truly reproaches of someone else
entirely: reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away
from it on to the patients own ego. According to Freud, the melancholic is
much angrier, and much more disappointed, by someone or something else
than she is with herself. Perhaps a betrothed girl has been jilted,
perhaps she has been disillusioned by her mother, or by a poorly funded
school. But rather than letting go, she clings to the relationship as it was
through a curious mechanism. She identifies with her lost love, and even
takes on its worst attributesthe mothers impossible standards, the
schools expectation of criminality. Freud writes that [her] narcissistic
identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic bond,
the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the
love-relation need not be given up The price she pays for hanging onto
her love is hanging on to her hate.
But depression is not only or always characterized by a repressed
identification that leads to self-hatred; it can also be caused by unrepressed
identifications that open out into an overwhelming empathy. I spent long
nights undone by documentaries about factory farming, days wild with rage
over the forced sterilizations of indigenous women. There is something
delusional in this empathy, to be sure: we do not all have equal claim to every
form of suffering. And yet, depression alerts you to an overlap between them,
the same way that Freud suggests that there is no need to be greatly
surprised that a few genuine self-reproaches are scattered among those that

have been transposed back from your lost love. There is genuine empathy
scattered among your empathetic fevers: empathy that lasts. In the
afterlife of my depression, the contours of my sense of human suffering have
permanently altered. I no longer have the reflexive disdain I once did for
people who dont get out of bed. I can instantly recognize a certain dilation of
the pupilswhat I privately think of as the wormhole look.
It is tempting to regard this enduring empathy as depressions most crucial
lesson, and therefore as melancholys most precious charm. We like to
believe that suffering will make us wise because it softens us to the suffering
of others. Of course, we cannot escape the deadly evidence to the contrary:
the studies that warn that the hazed will haze, the abused will abuse. In her
recent book of essays The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison identifies the perils
of empathy even as aspiration. Theres the danger of appropriation, which I
alluded to above. When bad things happened to other people, I imagined
them happening to me, Jamison writes. I [dont] know if this was empathy
or theft. But Jamison also has a sense of empathys impossible
asymptote, the skin that stays sticky between us. Appropriation is not only
a problem because youve claimed someone elses feeling as your own; it is
also a problem because what youve claimed is probablynecessarilynot
their feeling. Jamison gets at something Id like to believe about my own
depression: that it taught me something not only about empathy, but also
about empathys limits.
Friends who are in the trenches tell me how they feel: one is half-dead with
grief over the death of a distant cousin. Another cannot get out from under
the apocalypse of climate change. It turns my stomach to suspectto know
that they are, for lack of a better word, right. Suddenly I remember: just
because I dont know someone well should not make him unmournable. This
is our only planet. Lars von Trier allegorizes the prescience of the
disastrously depressed in his 2011 movie Melancholia. Kirsten Dunsts
charactera true basketcaseis the only one who can see that the earth will

soon be destroyed by an imminent collision with an unknown planet. Like my

friends, shes right. But what haunts me is not her rightness. What haunts
me is the evocation of that other planet. Sometimes depression can work like
the devils tuning fork, pointing toward the poisoned river running beneath
the surface of our society. But depression also is that river, the sign that what
we cannot sense, source or solvewhether illness or sweetness, fact or
feelingretains its own reality.

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